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My friend's
friend is my enemy
By Jeffrey Donovan
PRAGUE - Bowing to international pressure,
Syria this week formally said it would abide by
United Nations Resolution 1559 and pull thousands
of its soldiers and intelligence agents out of
Lebanon.
Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq
al-Shara made the pledge in a letter to UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan. The letter
reportedly said the pullout would take place
before Lebanon's expected elections in May.
The move is likely to have been welcomed
in Paris and Washington, which together have
spearheaded the UN's demand for a pullout.
In Beirut this week, US deputy assistant
secretary of state David Satterfield called a
Syrian withdrawal a precondition for Lebanon's
free and peaceful independence: "We want to see
[Resolution] 1559 implemented as well. We hope
that in a different Lebanon with a government that
represents the free will of its people, all the
issues that confront the Lebanese people can be
dealt with in peace and security," Satterfield
said.
Syria has come under
growing international pressure to comply with the
UN resolution after the assassination in February
of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Lebanon's opposition blames the killing on Syria -
which denies the charge - and has turned out in
mass street protests in recent weeks urging
Damascus to get out.
But analysts
interviewed by RFE/RL say that even with a
withdrawal by Syria - the de facto power broker in
Lebanon since the civil war there ended in 1990 -
Damascus will continue to hold sway over its
neighbor.
Large parts of Lebanon's body
politic remain allied with Syria, including
pro-Palestinian Hezbollah. That Iranian-funded
militant group recently turned out hundreds of
thousands of Lebanese onto Beirut's streets to
rally in favor of Damascus.
Nizar Hamzeh, a
politics professor at the American University of
Beirut, said, "Syria would retain influence,
definitely, through its allies in Lebanon, allies
labeled as the 'loyalist camp', starting [with]
Hezbollah."
Analysts say Syria is able to
exercise its will through groups such as
Hezbollah. And some accuse Syria of helping to
orchestrate a recent wave of bombings in Beirut
with the aim of inciting fear among anti-Syrian
forces.
But bombings in Lebanon are
merely one possible lever of destabilization that
Syria might wield in the region, according to
Nadim Shehadi, director of the Center for
Lebanese Studies at Britain's Oxford University.
Like analyst Hamzeh, Shehadi believes
Syria's pledge to withdraw its estimated 14,000
troops and security agents from Lebanon. He said
Syrian President Bashar Assad has been keen on
compromising with Washington since the invasion of
Saddam Hussein's Iraq two years ago. Compromise
"is something they've been trying to do ever since
they realized Saddam's statue has really fallen
and they're now surrounded by US power", he said.
Leaving Lebanon, however, is just one part
of a deal that Syria is offering Washington,
according to Shehadi. The rest of the deal,
Shehadi said, involves maintaining stability in
Lebanon, making peace overtures to Israel,
securing Syria's border to prevent militants from
going to Iraq and cooperating in the "war on
terrorism", and continuing a thaw in relations
with neighboring Turkey, a major US ally.
"The choice for the United States is
whether to play along with that and say - 'Okay,
Syria has delivered before and it has a lot to
promise' - or to continue with their policy, which
is that of regime change in both Syria and Iran
eventually and in the rest of the region," Shehadi
said.
For
now, Shehadi said he believes the administration of US
President George W Bush is not considering a
military option with regard to Syria. However, he
does see a potential for further US sanctions and
isolation of Damascus - a move that he believes
would only strengthen Assad's regime internally
and possibly lead Syria to destabilize the region.
Accepting Syria's "offer" would help shore
up short-term stability in Lebanon, which since
Hariri's killing has seen a wave of bombings and a
deterioration in the economy as businesses close
and investors flee.
But Shehadi said
accepting a deal with Syria could also leave
intact the roots of instability - and compromise
the Bush administration's stated objective of
spreading democracy throughout the Middle East.
"It's the question of whether the US has
the staying power to conduct a policy," he said.
"I'm not making a judgment of whether the policy
is good or bad. But when you come in and you upset
the balance, and you do not have the staying power
to get it right again, you can create more
problems than you resolve."
Syrian UN
Ambassador Fayssal Mekdad told Reuters that a
joint Syrian-Lebanese coordinating committee would
meet this week to set a timetable for his
country's withdrawal.
Meanwhile, the
specter of political instability looms in Lebanon.
The anti-Syrian opposition has refused to join a
national unity government led by pro-Syrian Prime
Minister Omar Karami. Karami now appears set to
step down, fueling doubts that parliamentary
elections, with voting phased over a five-week
period, can be completed on schedule by the end of
May.
Copyright (c) 2005,
RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of
Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW,
Washington, DC 20036. |
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